Wednesday, June 08, 2005

don't go back to rockville

ok ya'll, i know it's been awhile. but i've been busy for once! first new york with the mister to celebrate our anniversary early, and then DC alone for some serious NIH nerdiness.

the people there are great. it's like a hospital, but everyone wears open-toed shoes. the patients are all zebras! they don't care what time i come or go, but like a dutiful med student i come early and stay late. money flows like water, yo. in short- it's all those little things that make the rest of medicine bearable, all together in one place. i'll write more on this later.

but living in the DC metro area blows. i am in rockville, or north bethesda if you prefer. it's very white here, with big houses and volvos and "caution! children playing!" statuettes in the streets. thankfully rockvillans like their food tasty and organic, so i'm not too far from trader joe's and balducci's, which is what is known as either "bristol farms" or "highway fucking robbery" in LA. good for some things, but i want whatever awesome drug they were on when they decided to charge 8 bucks for honey. the song in this post's title was playing in there last night whilst i bought myself a dman good steak. i had a good laugh realizing no one else seemed to notice.

the DC metro is pretty and fast and has blinking light telling you when a train is coming, but those trains speed only towards to places 5 miles away from where i want to be. my house is a straight 3 mile shot down old georgetown road to NIH, yet it required either 1) a 20 minute walk, a bus ride, then a 10 minute walk, or 2) a 10 minute walk, a bus ride going the wrong way, getting on the metro for one stop, and a 10 mintue walk. this could take up to an hour and a half to complete. for a week i had no method of transport except my tender unused LA feet, and they had blisters on top of blisters after a week in new york. i felt like i was 13 again- so many places to go, no way of getting there without relying on a woefully inadequate transit system. thankfully, REI was close to a metro stop. so, i bought a bike with a comfy seat and some panniers. this transportation method is a bit better, but fuck, i've gotten used to getting out of bed with only enough time to get somewhere going 90mph, and this requires serious planning. i will have one hell of a body by august though.

the other summer kids i've seen are lame, and i haven't spoken to any of them. it doesn't help that most of them are pre-meds, and from the tony east coast schools. i'd like to say that i hope the medical school admissions process shaves a bit of arrogance off of their pretty, shiny haired little heads, but who am i fooling? those are the kids that get into hopkins and yale. that haughtiness has been finely tuned.

since this post has already gone to shit, i might as well change directions one last time: for some reason, my blog's name is mentioned in the june 6th LA times, although only to illustrate how some medical blogs have clever names. some other cleverly named blogs are mentioned quite extensively (what, no link?), but i am stoked nonetheless that one person has read my shit. thank you, random LA times writer. now would you tell your subscription department to stop fucking calling me?